NEW YORK, March 4 (Westlaw Business) Being an insider with a fiduciary duty sure is risky, as heavyweight Rajat Gupta is now finding out amidst serious SEC charges. So is having board members, as Goldman Sachs and Procter and Gamble are now worrying. Of great concern to each are the reputational risks and attendant costs that this might impose on them. The potential risks could relate to a broad range of issues, ranging from inside information, to disclosure of SEC investigation and board member protection. Though this likelihood may seem remote, recent experiences from Bank of America to Goldman Sachs itself show them to be painfully possible.

LONDON, March 1 (Complinet) – An international financial crime watchdog has been urged not to relax its stance on monitoring political officials in the light of the desperate scramble to freeze the assets of deposed leaders in the Middle East and North Africa.

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Feb. 25 (Westlaw Business) Big Brother has his eye on more than just filings: He is also surfing the Web to corroborate corporate disclosures. Staff correspondence filed by Scottsdale-based Hypercom Corp. shows that when it comes to rooting out potential sanctions-evaders in Iran and Syria, the Securities and Exchange Commission keeps close tabs. (more…)

LONDON, Feb. 24 (Complinet) -The British Treasury’s latest proposal for reshaping financial regulation, published last week, has given more detail to the plans set out in an outline last summer. The fundamental shape of the new bodies now looks to have been finalized, but many fine points on how the new approach will actually function in practical, operational and cultural terms are still under consideration.

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NEW YORK, Feb. 18, (Complinet) - The Securities and Exchange Commission market abuse unit is using new approaches to better identify insider trading and abusive conduct by market professionals. Unit Chief Daniel M Hawke said the SEC is using a trader-based approach to look for patterns across groups of people, such as related trades across different products and markets by a single trader or connected group of traders. The new approach has given the SEC a greater ability to detect relationships among traders, and bring cases against large trading networks.

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LONDON, Feb. 18 (Complinet) – UK regulatory lawyers have united in their concerns about giving the new Financial Conduct Authority the power to make insider dealing and other investigations public at their initial stage.

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Feb. 18 (Westlaw Business) The much-ballyhooed merger of the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange with that of German exchange Deutsche Borse makes two things clear – if they can make it through the thicket of global regulatory approvals and similarly convince their shareholders to tender into the offer, they’re home free. The just-filed agreement and related corporate governance documents make equally clear that “home” will not really be New York, and the NYSE Euronext will be the New York Stock Exchange no more. This may make regulatory approval that much more difficult, with U.S. regulators in particular looking at issues from antitrust to financial markets, to national security. (more…)

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Feb. 18 (Westlaw Business) The winds of change blowing across the Northern Sahara all but demand a look at foreign operations disclosures, particularly as many companies are deeply entrenched in preparing this year’s annual reports. Political risk has many guises—war, expropriation, currency devaluation—but for companies doing business abroad, these risks don’t begin to give a complete picture of potential threats to earnings. Just six weeks into 2011, a number of well-known companies have already provided a glimpse of what’s keeping their board members awake at night.